The Afterglow

A locally-made wooden painted turkey kit from nearby Bear Wallow Farm and a lovely pumpkin from Casey County, just a bit nibbled on by our chickens. The kit would be an easy thing to make with your children if you are crafty. (Alas, I am not.)

Here's what I love about Thanksgiving–it just extends into a nice, long weekend of leftovers and doing whatever it is that we want to do. Like hunker in on our ridge: playing games, watching old movies and family programs on television, chopping wood, general puttering around. Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday, even though this year it was just our immediate family (minus our daughter, for the third year in a row, who works at a ski resort back in Vermont where the holidays are a blur of accommodating skiers and their families). Our boys even had an entire week off from school, which we appreciated, even though we didn't travel anywhere. [And who wants to these days?]

This little fellow has the right idea after a hearty bowl of slop.

Henry chops pumpkins for the pigs.

We were thinking of going to the Liberty Christmas parade last night, and to the Clementsville Variety Show later on today (MCed this year by our friend Joberta Wells: and check out her new blog at The Casey County News where she is a columnist–she is our local "hoot" and deservedly so, as well as having coined the phrase). We were even going to see the new Harry Potter movie (which would be Henry's second time in a week). But we're not.

A late fall bull calf, born just before Thanksgiving on our farm.

Instead, our entertainment over the past few days has consisted of moving some cattle (including some of the neighbor's that had escaped). We watched our great friend, Chuckie Willard, back in New Hampshire, and the coverage of his trebuchet-building for Science Channel's On the Road to Punkin Chunkin [on the link, click on the "Tired Iron" video]. We also watched The Fabulous Beekman Boys first-season marathon on Planet Green (what a joy they are, and their animals, friends and Farmer John, who lives on the premises, and we can't wait for their Christmas special on December 8–on so many levels this is a worthwhile new reality series). Oh, yes: my husband's favorite actress of all time, Marjorie Main, had several feature movies on TCM this week, too. And who can not watch the annual reshowing of The Wizard of Oz? I still cry each time that Dorothy goes home again and it is delightful to experience this movie with our own children.

A daily reminder on my mantel.

Our wine glasses!

This year our holiday mantra will continue to be "simplify." Our Thanksgiving set the tone for that: we were all clean and well-scrubbed but changed into our comfortable pajamas after feeding the animals on the farm. Our boys wanted a "Jammy Thanksgiving" and they got it. If you are not entertaining anyone but yourselves, I highly recommend it! I didn't even pull out all of the decorative stops that I usually do. And we used paper towels for napkins! (OK, so I haven't ironed in a while.)

Part of my "Country Fare" in the hutch in NH.

We did pull out our silver and paired it with our Country Fare–my favorite every day pottery, made by Zanesville Pottery from the 1940s-60s (eventually bought out by Louisville Stoneware in Kentucky). Who knew one day that I–an Ohio girl, born and bred, raised in New England–would eventually be living in the state that adopted my favorite Ohio pottery?! Those are our farmer friends Peter Sawyer and Eric Tenney in our kitchen in Hancock in early December 2007, when we had another Thanksgiving dinner all over again, but our last in New Hampshire. [Our dear bull mastiff, Lucy, is curled up for a nap: she passed away here in Kentucky almost two years ago now.]

John, Tom and Patch in January 2009. Today was their second birthday (but Patch disappeared when he was six months). This is my favorite photo of them altogether, on my favorite chair.

Our former Hancock home in a Wallace Nutting print.

Thanksgiving is time to give pause to our many blessings, the love of each other, and memories of holidays past. I'm glad that I am at a point in my life now where I can remember the magical holidays of childhood and beyond without a full immersion of bittersweet sorrow, or even a tinge of it–where I can be in a memory or a feeling or a place in my mind and linger there, a bit, but not dwell too much in what has past. It's not always an easy thing for me. ["Dwell, Stew, Obsess!" in the words of cartoonist Roz Chast.]

Edward Henry Corbould (1869), Cold

I know why the holidays can be the hardest time of year for some people: I have been in that place. I now embrace the winter months like a warm, cozy throw. It is admittedly less wintry here in Kentucky but still just as dark, cold and bleak as any mild winter we have experienced in New Hampshire. Winter is now something I am happy to put on and to wear, like a shroud, as I tuck in for a few months of reflection and repurposing. It's a necessary system reboot for the soul.

What Sting said so poetically about the winter season of darkness in his notes for his beautiful album, If On a Winter's Night, captures what I feel about winter now:

Peter Ilsted (1861-1933), Woman Reading by Candlelight

Walking amid the snows of Winter, or sitting entranced in a darkened room gazing at the firelight, usually evokes in me a mood of reflection, a mood that can be at times philosophical, at others wildly irrational; I find myself haunted by memories. For Winter is the season of ghosts; and ghosts, if they can be said to reside anywhere, reside here in this season of frosts and in these long hours of darkness. We must treat with them calmly and civilly, before the snows melt, and the cycle of the seasons begins once more. 

A Footnote:

Seeing the credits roll past at the end of On the Road to Punkin Chunkin, we realized it was Chucky's tractor trailer driving out of town, east on Main Street in Hancock where we used to live in New Hampshire. But seeing it, in such a blur, we were able to stop the frames with the slow motion feature of TeVo, and there was our old house, in the top photo (at left, with the brick end). A strange encounter, indeed. The whirring of the sped up film also reminded me of how I process memory: that it flies through me in a blur and then it is gone again, like the wind. But where does it go?

Coming Soon to a Ridge Near You!

Sunday Dinner

Ham awaits preparation at a Sunday dinner we had with our Shaker friends in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

"Sunday Dinner" by Dan Masterson, is a pleasant conjurer of so many things for me: family gatherings, good food, communion, fellowship. [I highly recommend the daily poem in your email via Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac."] We used to entertain a lot more in New Hampshire, sometimes to the level that the poem describes (remember that my pantries had stuff in them that needed to be used once in a while!). But what it reminds me of most is the family dinners we used to have at my grandparents' Ohio house where we gathered together with my grandparents at the helm (who were raised during the last gasps of Victorian formality), their two children (my dad and his sister), their two spouses (my uncle and mother) and we six grandchildren (all cousins and siblings). We didn't get together on Sundays in any formal way but about once a month we would gather for either a birthday or a holiday dinner, or some combination of the two. My grandmother, if anything, was a great matriarch that way. Now we are deceased or scattered across the lower-48, as so many families are today, rather helm-less at times.

In New Hampshire, on my grandparents' farm (on my mother's side of the family), my grandmother would frequently roast one of their chickens for Sunday dinner after church–or just because–and serve it with vegetables and new potatoes from the garden. We would drive over to Silver Ranch (now Kimball Farms) for homemade ice cream for dessert. While the farm was a less formal environment, it was just as filled with that family sense of gathering and purpose, of old and repeated stories, of new thoughts and ideas, or laughter and foot nudges under the table. The last family gathering we had there was at Thanksgiving in 2003 when my mother brought us altogether for the last time. Now it seems like a pleasant dream from another lifetime.

Thanksgiving dinner in New Hampshire.

The poem "Sunday Dinner," which really seems like more of a winter or autumn poem to me, is about the formal trappings of gathering and ritual, even though it does not mention a person in it. Family and fellowship is only implied. A reminder of the Victorian age when the sideboard was a kind of gastronomic altar of abundance and plenty, the poem also evokes a simple Sunday dinner, too. You could say that this poem is just about food, inanimate objects and their presentation. When I read it, I also think about who might have cooked the food, how it was presented, what was the feeling behind it, who may have served it, and who were those who gathered to eat it. I think of the communal nourishment that is the essential part of so many gatherings of family or friends.

In some way, every family has had a Sunday dinner on occasion. I want to strive to make it more of a routine again in our household and not just for holidays. I hope that I am a matriarch-in-training for my children, and perhaps grandchildren, one day. I do believe, from both observation and experience, that every family needs a loving but declarative, no-nonsense but objective, matriarch or patriarch (or both) at its helm to be successful as a unit. Otherwise we can feel rather adrift and rudderless. And because there is nothing like a mother ship in a weary world.

Sunday Dinner

Linen napkins, spotless from the wash starched
And ironed, smelling like altar cloths. Olives
And radishes wet in cut glass, a steaming gravy bowl
Attached to its platter, an iridescent pitcher cold
With milk, the cream stirred in moments before.

The serving fork, black bones at the handle, capped
In steel, tines sharp as hatpins. Stuffed celery,
Cut in bite-sized bits, tomato juice flecked
With pepper, the vinegar cruet full to the stopper
Catching light from the chandelier.

Once-a-week corduroyed plates with yellow trim,
A huge mound of potatoes mashed and swirled.
Buttered corn, side salads topped with sliced tomatoes,
A tall stack of bread, a quarter-pound of butter
Warmed by its side. And chicken, falling off the bone:
Crisp skin baked sweet with ten-minute bastings.

Homemade pies, chocolate mints and puddings,
Coffee and graceful glasses of water, chipped ice
Clinking the rims.

Cashews in a silver scoop, the centerpiece a milkglass
Compote with caved-in sides, laced and hung
With grapes, apples, and oranges for the taking.

~ Dan Masterson

[from All Things, Seen and Unseen. © University of Arkansas Press, 1997]

Low, How a (Lenten) Rose E'er Blooming

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Old English Carol

This has been an unseasonably cold winter with either constant flurries or enough snow to keep people hunkered in or our kids home from school–a lot. I realize it is all relative to what we were used to in the northeast but when there isn't sufficient salt or snow-clearing equipment to treat the roads, you realize how treacherous a few inches of packed snow-turned-ice can be on a back road. And after a few months of colder-than-usual temps for what are usually balmier winters, and snow upon snow, well, it gets old. Spring will never be so sweet. That said, I do love that we still have four seasons here and that the spring and summer are both longer in duration.

This week I've been taking advantage of the warming weather and have been hiking up our knob almost every day: sometimes with the family and always with the puppies and other fauna. Today I went alone to the top of the knob (remember all of those hay bale images last summer–where it looks like you will fall off of the Earth?) and lay down on the warming ground and just took it all in. The "merry little breezes"swirled about, sometimes gathering leaves up into the air. Remember those in Thornton Burgess' Old Mother West Wind stories? My grandmother shared those books with me and I thought of them today and Burgess' love of nature.

The earth is different in spring: it is warm and fecund, full of promise. The same ground is cooler and more fallow in the fall as the woods release the wet, dank smell of decay. The sun is lowering in the sky and by spring it is climbing higher again. SUN! What a glorious thing it is! I always enjoy the inward time of winter but welcome the sun again like some kind of crazed animal.

So I lay back on the ridge and breathed in the air around me, listening alertly to the few sounds around the knob (where we can see 365 degrees around), and drinking in the sunshine. The animals were playing and lying around or near me, too, and we just all seemed to be in the moment together. When I came down a bit later, I was struck that over an hour had passed. It's not that I had walked that far, all told, but that I had allowed myself to enjoy the space–and place–without interruption or attention to time.

The other day when we all walked together after school, Henry turned to his Dad and said, "We sure do have a nice farm here, Dadda." It made me happy to hear that. I am starting to send out new growth shoots here into the land but to our boys this has probably already become their homeplace. We don't have the dream farmhouse yet, we long ago left the mansion. Ultimately it's not about the four walls but who is within them. A friend of mine said the other day, "Home is always where the people I love are." Like the "home tree" in Avatar, we now connect with each other and with the world from our farm on a ridge in Kentucky. It's been the journey of a lifetime.

IMAGE: In our first winter here, two years ago, we discovered two colors of Lenten roses (helliobores) blooming on the north side of our doublewide. They start to emerge and blossom in late February.

Old Chestnuts

An Appalachian Spring is the most sweetly-savored seasonal experience I've ever had: long, with gradually emergent flora–and certainly fauna–over the span of about two or more months, and filled with bird song. While I was delighted to find that we have four seasons here, of varied durations from a New England year, the spring is my most favorite time to be in the knobs and hollers of Kentucky.



Composer Aaron Copland's glorious symphony, Appalachian Spring, captures that beauty and emergence of spring in music. I often listened to it as a young girl with my father on the hi-fi in our suburban living room, where Appalachia seemed like a distant and dreamy place somewhere on the map south of our little corner of northeastern Ohio. Little did I know that one day, by way of New England, I would be living here or that "Appalachia" also technically includes most of New England and much of the northeastern corridor. Now we live in its most westerly foothills, the lovely, rolling "knob region" of south-central Kentucky.

Over at Cupcake Chronicles, we're getting back on track with our mutual reading and blogging. This month we are enjoying Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. This is the first novel I have read by her, having enjoyed her essay collections and her nonfiction gem, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which we read together last summer. A Kentucky native and a biologist by training, the natural world, landscape and its people inform much of Kingsolver's writing and especially this novel. She is certainly one of our finest living writers.

I don't often do this but I am double-posting today at Cupcake Chronicles and here at In the Pantry. I needed a bit of spring today as we begin to thaw and warm again, and hope you might, too. In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to read this book along with the Cupcakes–you are more than welcome to join our conversation!

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In Chapter 3 of Prodigal Summer we are introduced to Garnett at the start of a morning in May. Already I know that this novel is so richly tied to Appalachian place and landscape and the people in it: home places, farms, cabins, hollows. Last night I had to pause to reread this short and luminous chapter again. Because of its beauty, and its resonance for me here in Kentucky, I couldn't wait to include it here this morning in its short, breathtaking entirety:

Eight years a widower, Garnett still sometimes awoke disoriented and lost to the day. It was because of the large empty bed, he felt; a woman was an anchor. Lacking a wife, he had turned to God for solace, but sometimes a man also needed the view out his window.

Garnett sat up slowly and bent toward the light, seeing as much with his memory as with his eyes. There was the gray fog of dawn in this wet hollow, lifted with imperious slowness like the skirt of an old woman stepping over a puddle. There were the barn and slat-sided grain house, built by his father and grandfather in another time. The grass-covered root cellar still bulged from the hillside, the two windows in its fieldstone face staring out of the hill like eyes in the head of a man. Every morning of his life, Garnett had saluted that old man in the hillside with the ivy beard crawling out of his chin and the forelock of fescue hanging over his brow. As a boy, Garnett had never dreamed of being an old man himself, still looking at these sights and needing them as badly as a boy needs the smooth lucky chestnut in his pocket, the talisman he rubs all day just to make sure it's still there.

The birds were starting up their morning chorus. They were in full form now, this far into spring. What was it now, the nineteenth of May? Full form and feather. He listened. The prothalamion, he had named this in his mind years ago: a song raised up to connubial union. There were meadowlarks and chats, field sparrows, indigo buntings, all with their heads raised to the dawn and their hearts pressed into clear liquid song for their mates. Garnett held his face in his hands for just a moment. As a boy he had never dreamed of an age when there was no song left, but still some heart.

I am already reveling in the natural and peopled world of Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and perhaps am enjoying it all the more because it has been a very cold and snowy January.

NOTE: I had to look up prothalamion: it is a song or poem celebrating an upcoming wedding, from the title of a Tudor-era poem by Edmund Spenser, written in 1596.

NOTE on MY PHOTOGRAPHS: The indigo bunting is a common bird here in south-central Kentucky. At first we thought they were bluebirds darting back and forth in front of us, but the feathers of an indigo bunting are an even more intense blue. I actually saw our first bluebirds here a few weeks ago on a fence post behind our house. [Apologies for my not owning a zoom lense–that would have enhanced these photographs.]

As you might expect by now, old home places are a recurring photographic subject of mine: the window image is from an abandoned Greek Revival farmhouse near the community of Forkland and Gravel Switch (now used to store hay and farm equipment) and the root cellar is built into a cool, shaded northern hillside across the street from it on another property. Both images were taken in May 2009.

Keeping Vigil

I haven't written much about our neighbor Ida and her farm because, well, I'm probably leery of writing too much about other people here or their stories. Or perhaps it is because I have not wanted to intrude or that it is all just too close to home in the literal sense. PHOTO–Ida has always been proud of her hollyhocks and blackberries. These have always flourished on the east side of her house and she made sure I got some seeds this summer.

We we took a real shine to Ida when we first met her two years ago in her board-and-batten farmhouse across the road from our doublewide farm property and the "knob piece." My husband, being a generally more knock-on-the-door and say "Hi-ya" kind of guy than I, paved the way for our friendship.


"House when new" and Ida's sister, Maythel, c. 1940 (not certain of photo dates)

Mr. and Mrs. Walter (Bannie) Dye (Ida's parents) and their three youngest children (some of Ida's siblings): Pete, Dickie and Maythel with the guitar.

She immediately reminded us of our dear neighbor and friend, Dot Grim, who had lived across the street from us in New Hampshire (and sadly died only a few weeks before we moved to Kentucky). They were both feisty women in their late 80s who lived their lives their way, inspiring in me a kind of awestruck admiration. One day, during the fall when we moved our things and I was cleaning house in advance of the moving truck, Ida brought me a pile of huge tomatoes that she had grown as a housewarming gift. "How are you today, Ida?" I asked. "As mean as ever!" she said with an impish grin. It seemed you always knew where you stood with Ida and that's a rare and welcome thing.


Ida's brother Dickie with his horses, Dock and Dan and Ida's mother, Bannie Dye.

Another time I was sharing with her some concerns about someone who was always talking about how Christian they were, but yet there was something I didn't quite trust about them. Ida's answer was the wisest counsel I've heard on the subject: "Do they walk the walk?" I said I wasn't sure–I only knew them at our house when they did some work on the place. "Well, that's what matters–if they spend too much time talking, they probably aren't doing a whole lot of walking!" Ida told us how the three Baptist churches on the ridge used to baptize people down on the creek below. I always looked forward to spending more time with Ida but in this past year she has been in Tennessee for much of the time. She was independent, too, and you have to respect when someone wants to do for themselves so we tried not to intrude too often, and usually only when asked. This fall she often liked to spend time at my husband's shop having coffee with him. She loved it when our boys mowed her lawn and insisted on paying them something, even if they refused.


"Stock barn and Pap's wagon" [sadly, we had to tear the barn down last year as it was ready to fall down and needed too much work to be righted again.] We will one day build our farmhouse to the rear left of it. Now, with the barn gone, the famous "short-core" apple tree is in full view, a kind of indigenous old heirloom apple that even Kentucky novelist Janice Holt Giles wrote about.

In 2008 before Thanksgiving and after we had been here a year, Ida's daughter–who lives out of state and had bought the farm from her mother about ten years ago–approached us about buying the farm from her. We couldn't believe it as we'd often thought to ourselves, "maybe one day, wouldn't it be nice..." So much land here is sold at "Absolute Auction" where it is subdivided and often split up in rancorous battles between families, which is sad and demeans the spirit of the land. We had left our own family farm situation back home in irreparable shambles after trying to carry on with the legacy, and yet had purposefully left the land as intact as we could, even getting protective conservation easements. We sensed that Ida's daughter wanted the same kind of thing for her family farm and have come to know that with certainty.


"Dempsey Dye–their home place at the end of the long field."

Ida's daughter knew we were planning to have a cattle farm here and she came to the realization that, apart from the occasional visit, she would not be living here enough to justify owning it any more. As her daughter had done, we gave Ida life estate of her home and nearby in the past year we have built a shop and woodshed. It is on her farm where we will eventually build our own farmhouse. The land sits across the road from our knob pasture and doublewide home and so we've joined, effectively, two old ridge farms together.


"Brooder house and Grandma's (Bannie's) chickens across the drive near the corner of road and drive." (person unidentified–our shop is now at this location as the brooder house is long gone)

When we saw Ida on Saturday, in a local nursing home, I was stunned by the change in her, and so quickly. We last saw her two months ago, before she returned to Tennessee where she has another house, and the place hasn't been the same without her around. All she could say when she saw us was, faintly, "It's all going to be beautiful." And she said my name, repeating it as if to place me. She smiled when I told her that our boys were there, too, and that they'd been taking care of her golf cart. And yet I wasn't certain she knew who we were.


"Grandma's (Bannie's) chickens and yard (and) barn before wings were added."

Before Ida headed south for the holidays two months ago, my husband drove her around the farm, showing her what we had done to restore the fields and hedgerows. She told him, repeatedly, "Pap would be so pleased with what you have done." Over the past two years she has pointed out old places, like the "pennywinkle spring" (pennywinkle is another name for vinca or myrtle which grows wild in the woods here) where the neighbors used to gather for water and gossip, the various houses on the ridge where she has lived, of the ghosts that have visited them from time to time. In the past few years Ida has shared many stories about the farm and I always wanted to hear more (fortunately some are written down and my husband has a great memory for the spoken word). She told us how they stored the apples from the "short-core" tree out back (under where our dog Lucy is now buried) in the haymow and how they kept through the winter until the spring. She shared some darker stories, too, of harder times and circumstances. Ida did not always live on the ridge, and for many years as far away as Chicago, but she came home to it again. Her brother Dickie, for a time, lived up the road in a small house on the farm.


"Dock and Dan and Pete?"

This morning we learned that Ida's grandson had been visiting before we were there on Saturday. He was telling her about the farm and commented on the changes we had made and about the fencing and cleaning up here and there that we'd done this fall. So Ida's daughter believes that she did know who we were and that she was talking about the farm when she said, "It's all going to be beautiful." I'd like to think, too, perhaps, that she might have already been catching glimpses of a world beyond as I've seen it in people before they pass on, as if they are straddling two realms of existence. Now her family waits by her side or in their thoughts and prayers. As her daughter said this morning, "Mother has always known how to live her life." But it is never easy to let someone go and getting older myself doesn't make that any easier.


"Front yard looking east." Apart from the gate and the tree in the foreground, this view hasn't changed at all.

Today, in a strange kind of epiphany and after a week of some occasional doubt and a bit of holiday homesickness, I realized why we are here in Kentucky (a question people often ask of us): I believe now it is to keep Ida's home fires burning, even if we could not tend to our own, try as we might, back in New Hampshire. This was a gift, beyond any measure or real estate transaction: Ida and her daughter have allowed us the opportunity to create our own family homeplace, our own roots on an old family farm in Kentucky, a place where only a few years ago we knew no one. It is our own slice of heaven in a strife-filled world–without the chords of upset and baggage, while cared for with our best intentions.

Dear Ida–we will miss your spirit and your warm welcome to our family here on your ridge: to your land, your farm, your Kentucky homeplace. We will always try our best to honor what you and your family have kept here–intact and well-loved–while cherishing it ourselves. We now have a chance to be caretakers of another family legacy, while also making it our own. This I am sure about–we never really own the land beneath us, except on paper, but the land has a way of binding us to it.

Postscript. This morning, Wednesday, I learned that early Tuesday evening, January 4, 2010, Ida Elizabeth Doyle, passed away. She was 88. Here is her obituary and it reads, in part, "She was born on her parents, Walter and Bannie Dye, farm on May 23, 1921 in what is now Nancy, KY and returned back here in the 1970s. Ida was widely traveled but loved the home place best, perhaps because she intimately knew every tree, stone, spring, and field."

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
in Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

~ Robert Frost

NOTE on Photos: To best appreciate this you have understand that my office is an absolute wreck and I'm not kidding (think Hoarders kind of wreck). So today, when thinking about blogging this entry as I do not have a photograph of Ida, I remembered the copies of old photos of the farm that Ida's daughter had given us and I thought, "Where must they be? I only saw them a few weeks ago..." But a few weeks in a cluttered office, especially at the holidays, is like a small epoch. Before two minutes had passed I had found them: my intuition told me to look in a box to the right of my desk, and there they were. In another pile I have transcriptions of many of Ida's old farm and ridge memories that her daughter wrote down several years ago. With her daughter's permission, I might share some of them here from time to time.

Home for Christmas

Hearth and home…there's no place like home, no matter where it is.

Have you ever been homesick for a place or a person or a life you once led? I was never homesick in college or on two academic stretches in England, or even three years working in Boston. It was probably because home was never really more than a few hours away–and in England I often felt like, in many ways, I had returned home or at least had been there before in many beloved books and interests.

Oddly enough, the only place I was ever truly homesick for any prolonged stretch–that gut-wrenching kind of feeling when you can't eat or sleep and you just want to cry all the time–was for most of the two weeks in my only stint of summer camp in my 11th year back in Akron, Ohio. I had stayed at Camp Ledgewood on weekends many times as a Girl Scout, but always with my troop and often with my mother there as troop leader. It was reassuring in that setting and it was safe, despite the ghost stories late at night in our bunks and the success at levitating poor Kathie Worrell right off a wooden bench after which we screamed so hard that we dropped her on her back (and one of the other women chaperones went home in the middle of the night). Being scared–and hysterical–just felt right with your mother and best school friends in the next bunks and the glow and warmth from the embers in the stone fireplace crackling and dying away.

Even at summer camp, I shared a cabin with one of my best childhood friends. But in came the raccoons sniffing us at night on our cots and the shocked looks and whispers of the other campers when they heard from my friend that my parents were getting a divorce (remember: this was 1973 in a largely conservative suburban upbringing where these things hadn't really happened before). It just buckled my world and it became home that I missed, and the home that I thought I had had, and where I thought I was best understood: the presence of my mother and my younger brothers, the comfort of my bed and my things, our dog, and the hemmed in familiarity of our house and neighborhood. My father had moved just a mile away in a new apartment and my grandparents remained on the other side of Market Street in their large but welcoming home that always felt like family history and holidays and smelled of ashes and roses. That summer everything changed, including my self-confidence.

Looking back on that time I always figured that it was the recent change in our lives that had made me want to be closer to home: my parents had separated only a few months before and told us that they would be on a humid May night while I'd been watching Sonny & Cher. This is what I remember: the baby doll pajamas I was wearing, the gold fish in Cher's lucite shoes and one of my brothers asking if we'd still be able to go to see the Cleveland Indians games with our Dad. A month later I climbed into my father's lap to say goodbye. He was sitting on the green chair in the living room and it was the first time I saw him cry. Later that day we feasted on fried chicken, waffles and scones all prepared by Mrs. Wirth, the minister's wife down the street, after a full day at Play Land, a small amusement park outside of Akron. [And thus began my journey with food as comfort.]

In high school I was a homebody, too, feeling responsible while helping my then single mother. Ironically, in the last few days of camp when I was finally enjoying myself and not worrying about home (or my mother), I was summoned to see Cat, the head of the camp. I knew that something was wrong. She wouldn't tell me, despite my tears, and when my father picked me up a long hour later after I'd gotten my things together, I learned that my grandmother had died. The next day, sitting by my father as he played the organ at his mother's memorial service in the large church, I saw him weep quietly for a second time in as many months.


One of many Houses of Holidays Past, but the most recent and lingering in my memory.

Ironically, being in Kentucky feels like the first time I've truly left home, even though I've been married for over thirteen years and have lived in several homes, and locations, since college ended twenty-five years ago. Last winter I had persistent house dreams of former homes and I had waking homesickness for our last home, especially around the holidays: that house, big and old and full of history, was made for Christmas and all family occasions. It sat in the middle of a small New England village and when it snowed, you could swear you were part of a charming snow globe scene or in a winter remake of the movie Pleasantville. Of course, there was also the farm where I grew up and I am still reconciling that reality. Even though we were the ones to effectively obliterate it, it ceased being "home," in the welcome sense of things, over eight years ago. That would likely be the case today, even if we had never purchased it with the intentions of retaining and reviving a family homeplace.


In the past few years I have continued to make a new home: new friendships, new connections, new feelings for the land around me. It has been a gradual process but there are times, like today, where I feel the ache of loneliness for what I have left behind, especially the proximity of several great and easy friends, quite fluid and natural friendships, that were so welcome after not feeling a part of my own family any more. Good restaurants and small shops where everybody knew your name and were glad to see you. An ease, at times, of too much familiarity. A culture that fit versus a culture where I am trying to fit in while still being myself.

Perhaps the gloom of the time of year is just starting to kick in. December is a more inward time: we celebrate the darkest and longest night of the year on December 21st and then it is no accident that the days start to brighten again. Or that Christmas is the celebration of God's light on Earth–Emmanuel, "God With Us." I need to always remember that it isn't the house or the place, but the light within. But it certainly can be about the people, too: those we love and those we want to know better. As much as I love the people in my house, and the haven of my home, I realize how social a creature I am, too, and yet sometimes "barking up the wrong tree" is my fatal flaw. I would have been a great puppy dog who wants to please his master no matter how dismissively he is treated at times. Only connect! wrote E.M. Forster in Howard's End. [This is easier said than done at times.] PHOTO ~ "You are the Light of the World." A sheep in the barn at the United Society of Friends, Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

I am so blessed and I need to remember that, too. It is also good to always remember and visit with the Ghosts of Christmases Past but to not linger too long in their company. Last night I started reading a book that felt like an old friend: A Kentucky Christmas, edited by George Ella Lyon and published by the University Press of Kentucky [2003].

I bought it and had it signed by Lyon in November 2007 when I was a participant in the Kentucky Book Fair and peddling my pantry book in the year it was published. [Imagine my delight to also be a few tables down from the esteemed, and quite humble, Wendell Berry and have him sign some books for me. I also had the good chance to visit with other Kentucky authors such as David Dominé, and Bruce and Shelley Richardson of Elmwood Inn fame, who sat on either side of my table.]

Here is a poem from this Christmas-related collection from Kentucky authors. It resonated with me last night before bedtime and perhaps somewhat prompted this introspective feeling today. So, rather than brood and dwell and stew, as can be my nature, I wanted to pause during a busy day to write these feelings out and to share this poem with you. I will be excerpting other things from A Kentucky Christmas in the weeks ahead and will read it aloud with my family. I know, for some of us, that this time of year can be as much of a sorrowful time as it can be joyous. And that's alright. But I will strive to be happy and merry and, in the words of Tiny Tim, "God bless us, every one!"

Home for Christmas

I want to be there
but I no longer know the way.
It needn't be Tiny Tim
or a new doll
Not even snow
pine and cedar
or wood-smoke.

We know what it is:
a love that's in spite of
a gathering in–
because one must–
a Holy Adoring
a baby asleep
a star in the sky
a glow in the heart

Where?
It has to be here
I cannot go back
and back is not there
It has to be here.

~ Kathleen Hill Sterling

NOTE from A Kentucky Christmas ~ Kathleen Hill Sterling was born in Kentucky in 1914. She studied at her beloved Eastern Kentucky University, married her college sweetheart, Ed, reared her children and taught in the mountains of Harlan County, and retired to a Florida shore and a Kentucky lake. Throughout her life–whether laughing, loving, grieving, working, playing, thinking–she let her pen in on the secret. A poet and short-story author, she was foremost a mother and teacher of poets, encouraging her students to let their eyes sink deep and conjure up what was really there. She taught them to trust what they saw, felt and knew and to never be timid. She emboldened student poets, yet for modesty's sake, she tucked most of her own work between the pages of her journals. She died in 1996.

Midway

I used to be a more spontaneous person. And then I had a child. And then I married a man who likes a plan (generally). And then I had two more children. And then I got rather broody and nesty, where I didn't want to stray too far from home. I'm not complaining. I wouldn't have it any other way and yet, all the while I've had this innate wanderlust: an armchair travel sense of "what's beyond the rainbow? what's through the dell?" It's not so much a romantic spirit or a greener pastures kind of thing, more of a "what's behind door number 3?" But wait! I also wanted to see what was behind doors number 1 and 2. Like many people today, I want it all at once.

Well, I know what you're thinking: didn't this woman just move 1,100 miles across the country from her familiar to a land where she knew no one? Isn't that like opening doors 1-3 all at the same time? Yes, and that hasn't been without its complications, it's string-tugging and introspection and periodic bewilderment. It has also brought a great deal of joy and wonder and shear jumping up and down, too. [Pandora and I would have gotten along famously. "Let's see what Carol Merrill has behind Door Number TWO!"] But now that I'm here and settled and refiguring what is meant by "home place," I'm redefining the concept of home, too, and what is it that I want from my home (and family) and what do I want to give back to it (and them)? Same thing with the rest of my life: what's next?

Occasionally along the journey I've lost that zest–you know, that lust for life that hits you when you wake up in the morning and say, mm, what will I do today? Oh, I think I'll go in a direction I've never been, to boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before, but only after I do ten loads of laundry, plan dinner, and run three miles (no, not really). It's not that bad but sometimes I am overcome by focus–or lack thereof–and if I plan too far ahead, well, then I can easily derail myself. At the same time, I often run from a whim or a possibility because I feel I won't live up to the expectations of others, or I get stage fright, or I think I'd rather be at home puttering in circles like a whirling dervish (and in a home that is not always ready for company). Around and around she goes. [But a fully stocked, well-planned pantry, that I do have...well, sort of: it's in several locations right now. Don't ask.]

It goes without saying that I can drive people nuts or be considered inconsiderate. I frequently apologize to the people in my life. I'm a good idea person–an idea starter with the best intentions but my follow through, well, let's just say a lot of balls get dropped. When I'm writing, it's a different thing altogether. I focus, I do well on deadline, I want to make it all work. I tune out the clatter. I periodically bake or cook something familiar–or new–to help refocus again.

You might say that this woman needs a life, a job, a purpose. Well, part of midlife, midway, so to speak, and being a few months away from my "late forties" is that I'm finding new purposes. My boys are needing me less, or so it seems, and my daughter is off in the world. I've had a "mini empty nest" experience in the past year: both with my daughter being on her own and with my own nest-shaking and relocation. I am settling well at last but it has been a journey and will continue to be one. I've never been a joiner type of person but rather a loner who likes to socialize on occasion but with comfortable small groups of diverse friends or individual friends. I "play well with others" but I crave solitude, too. That's just how I've always rolled.

As I've become older I've grown more comfortable with girlfriends, as I have with my own uniqueness. I have always enjoyed talking with intelligent, interesting men and listening to their ideas, philosophies and thoughts on life–appreciating their usual candor and ability to cut through the cow poop. Yet I often misunderstand the nuances and niceties of other women. Perhaps my newly found candor and authenticity can be off-putting at times. We, as women, tend to dance around each other while men just cut right to the chase. In another life I'm convinced that I ran a literary salon where ideas were discussed as freely and openly as the absinthe was poured. And I'm sure I smoked a lot. Either that or I was a Shaker in a very egalitarian society and did a lot of canning.

Yesterday my friend Teresa sent me a musing that a woman, Pam Young, posted recently on FlyLady. In her "Young at Heart" essay she spoke of dealing with our inner child in our forties and trying to tame her:

We have the ability now to get to know our little child within us. We have neglected that child for a long time. Like any child they are going to get your attention one way or another. We have let her run wild in the streets with our credit cards. She has neglected to clean her room and to eat good foods. She stays up way too late and doesn't get enough sleep! This makes her cranky. Oh and she spends way too much time on the computer and doesn't get enough exercise. Do you know anyone who would allow her children to do this? So why do you allow yourself to do this?

Exactly: Why? But why, also, do we punish ourselves so severely or allow ourselves to be held up to what society says we should be or how we should look or how our houses should appear inside? Teresa has recently become an advocate of the website Operation Beautiful which advocates a form of stealth Post-Its in all the right places–notes of positive reinforcement, a form of paying it forward in the nicest possible way. Think Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, played by Al Franken before he was the (finally) elected Senator from Minnesota (yay, Al!), saying to himself in the mirror: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and doggone it...people like me." Only you see it on a Post-It, in different expressions and on bathroom mirrors–and other public places–or where you least expect to see them.

This past year I've realized that not only should a mother give herself oxygen first lest the entire enterprise fall to the Earth (my friend Edie calls this "the choose yourself first" mantra, which isn't as selfish as it sounds), but that home is not only where the heart is but where we are. I don't like to reduce life to a greeting card (but hey, it's a blog), but sometimes that reductionist thinking is really that simple. Several from Mary Engelbreit are constant reminders to me: "No matter where you go, there you are," also "Bloom where you are planted" and “If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.” [That is also the core mantra of Buddhist mindfulness as well as DBT or dialectical behavior therapy.]

We can't always change our (sometimes difficult) circumstances or the minds of (sometimes difficult) people, we can only change our reactions and interactions with those circumstances and people. Above all, we have the power to change ourselves or our behaviors. That I am doing: with a lot of introspection, honesty, new purpose and direction. And a very patient family who lives with me (and who love me for who I am). In the process I am peeling back, and peeling off, the layers. It is both frightening and liberating.














In The Wizard of Oz–ironically on TCM tonight and that we watched for the bazillionth time–Good Witch Glinda instructs Dorothy that the power to get home has been there all along, within herself and in her own back yard. It's such a simple sentiment and yet so powerful:

Dorothy asks Glinda, the Good Witch, "Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?"

"You don't need to be helped any longer," A smiling Glinda answers. "You've always had the power to go back to Kansas."

"I have?"

"Then why didn't you tell her before?" Scarecrow demands.

"Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself."

The Tin Man leans forward and asks, "What have you learned, Dorothy?"

"Well, I . . . I think that is . . . that it wasn't enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em . . . and that if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard; because if it isn't here, I never really lost it to begin with."

In Andrew Johnson's pitch-perfect essay on The Spirituality of Oz–The Meaning of the Movie on the Theosophical Society in America's website, he writes that this is what Dorothy learned:

1. We have the power. We have Ruby Red slippers to transport us to Kansas, to bring about the Edenic state, or to create our heart's desire.

2. Witches and cyclones, while bad, can be a means for spiritual growth.

3. We must learn for ourselves. Truth is not given so much as it is realized. Look within. You do not have to go off in search of a mystic or seek truth from a variety of exotic religions. Truth is found in your own back yard.

4. Reality is very simple. We create our own reality. We tend to make it more complicated than it need be. The simple universal fact is that, if we believe it to be so, it is.

5. There's no place like home. The kingdom of heaven is not a place; but a condition.
   

Reprint from Quest 88 (November-December 2000): 213-7.

The poet and writer Maya Angelou said, "It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable." It is a great thing to be comfortable in our own back yard and in "the temple of our familiar," as Alice Walker wrote about, but sometimes it is good to wander a bit outside of it, away from the garden gate and the apron strings. To enjoy a new world and realm–to select a journey, but to sometimes depart from it, too. To always find the way home again after a series of dead-ends, new roads, new horizons. To savor the unexpected as my friend Teresa and I did, today, in a town called Midway, Kentucky. It was a very unplanned, spontaneous visit (the date determined a few days ago and our destination and itinerary were only decided this morning at 10am), and we hadn't seen each other in over six months. It was a great journey and I only spent the gas money (thanks Teresa for lunch!). [Photos and travelogue to follow soon.]

Lucy's Pantry

Lucy's practical pantry is an extension of her kitchen where she enjoys more counter space and good eastern light. In true New England farmhouse fashion, it was built on the northeast corner of the ell where it is cool in summer and like a natural ice box in winter.

One thing I'd like to do more regularly on my blog is to feature more pantries and kitchens. As you can imagine, if you have your own copy of The Pantry (or even if you don't!), it was impossible to feature all of the pantry photos and pantry quotes I might have liked to have done. I still photograph pantries when I can or write down pantry-related quotes in books I am reading or old magazine articles I come across. One thing is for certain: pantries have always been well-loved, much used, practical spaces. Some people, like Lucy Davison, have never done without one.

I met Lucy several years ago when driving around Henniker, New Hampshire with my husband and boys. He saw his old friend Shirley (or "Shirl"), Lucy's husband, out haying across from the old Quaker meetinghouse, and we stopped to visit. That winter, while I was still researching and writing The Pantry, we had them to dinner and I spoke with her about pantries and kitchens and food (three of my favorite topics). Lucy was a former school teacher before she married Shirley in her late 30s. Since the 1970s they have shared an old New England farmhouse together, complete with an ell kitchen, a well-used pantry, and an old wood-burning Glendale cook stove that she uses most of the year. She reminds me, in her practical self-reliance, of my Old Order Mennonite friends and others in Kentucky who have always put up food from their sustenance gardens.


Lucy has many old-fashioned cottage garden flowers: the rampant valerian (or "Garden Heliotrope"), blue lupine and, over on the east side of the kitchen, the largest bed of "Golden Glow," in the rudbeckia family, that I've seen before. It blooms later in the summer (and I brought a clump to Kentucky from my own New Hampshire garden).

Lucy cans and freezes throughout the summer from her prolific garden and prides herself on not having to go to the store too often (they also have chickens for meat and eggs and raise a few cows for beef–they also used to have dairy cows). They more or less live in their kitchen, as they are in the photograph (taken on my recent trip to New Hampshire), and from windows on either side, to the east and west, they can see who is driving by or who is coming to their door.

In The Pantry in "The Farmhouse Pantry" chapter I wrote about Lucy's pantry (but did not include photographs because of space and design limitations):

For several decades, Lucy Davison has put up the bounty from the garden at the New England farm she shares with her husband, Shirley, 87. Their farmhouse has a long, narrow pantry with shelves and a large workspace in front of a sunny window. "I love a pantry," Lucy says. "I do my baking preparations in there because we entertain in the kitchen–you just leave the bread and the old milk cup and dirty bowls. You can take off your apron and close the door." Their kitchen has a reliable Glendale stove where she does her extensive canning: tomatoes, pickles, all kinds of jams and jellies.